Vanedge Capital leads $3.5 mln funding in Privacy Analytics

Vanedge Capital has led a $3.5 million funding round in Privacy Analytics Inc., which provides data anonymization services. Vanedge joins BDC IT Venture Fund and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research as primary investors in Privacy Analytics.

Press Release

Privacy Analytics Inc. (www.privacyanalytics.ca), a leading provider of data anonymization solutions, announced today that it has raised (US) $3.5M in a round led by Vanedge Capital, a Vancouver-based venture capital fund. Vanedge joins the BDC IT Venture Fund and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) as the primary investors in Privacy Analytics. V. Paul Lee, Managing Partner for Vanedge, will join the company’s board of directors. The funds will be used to increase Privacy Analytics sales and marketing efforts, as well as bolster development of its PARAT software product line.

“We are thrilled to be working with Paul and Vanedge, whose team brings deep expertise to help our company grow and scale,” said Khaled El Emam, Founder and CEO, Privacy Analytics Inc. “The funding enables us to accelerate building richer functionality into our PARAT product line, while expanding our efforts to enable companies to manage and govern the privacy and sharing of big data in healthcare and financial sectors.”

“We believe Privacy Analytics is well situated to become the de facto standard for automated risk-based anonymization in healthcare and other industries,” said Mr. Lee. “As organizations gather more data, they’ll need enterprise solutions to manage and monetize sharing of information to avoid the costly breaches of personal information that have dominated the media as of late. In Khaled we have a world-leader in privacy and someone who can make privacy solutions accessible to all industries.”

Founded in 2007, Privacy Analytics was formed at the University of Ottawa, where its software, PARAT, was incubated and patented from research conducted at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario’s Research Institute. The company’s customers represent half of Fortune 50 healthcare companies, as well as leading academic and research organizations, such as The Center for Clinical Excellence at Mount Sinai in New York City and the Better Outcomes Registry and Network (BORN) Registry in the province of Ontario.

PARAT safeguards and enables data for analysis. The software automates this process by setting re-identification risk thresholds based on the situational and intended use of the shared data in accordance with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. The software then applies risk thresholds to the anonymization of personal data residing in standard database tables, text and other document formats.

As a result, customers gain high quality individual-level data for analysis, while simultaneously protecting personal information. The anonymized data can be used for secondary purposes, such as research, quality and safety improvement, public health, payment, certification or accreditation, software testing and other business applications with an automated, enterprise-standard process that saves substantial time and money.

Vanedge Capital is a Canadian venture capital fund focused on making investments in gaming, digital media, SaaS solutions for small and medium businesses, enterprise software, and cyber security. Vanedge invests in visionary entrepreneurs and fast growing companies that are poised to disrupt an incumbent business, or create a new market via the introduction of new technologies and business models. The fund is particularly focused on companies that are capitalizing on opportunities brought about by the shift to mobile, transition to digital, and migration to cloud based computing.

About Privacy Analytics

Privacy Analytics (www.privacyanalytics.ca) provides organizations with enterprise software to safeguard and enable data for secondary purposes using a risk-based approach that optimizes the analytic utility of anonymized data sets. PARAT automates the anonymization of structured and unstructured information from multiple sources in compliance with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements. It is the only company to offer its customers off-the-shelf software, peer-reviewed methodology and valued-added services that protect the privacy of individuals while allowing organizations to share data for research and analysis.